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Another Look at the 2010 World Cup

HyperaktThe radial World Cup poster was produced by the dedicated Barcelona fan Deroy Peraza, a graphic designer who says that doing sports projects allows him “a good excuse to be nerdy.”

The awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar is certain to change the way the world views the sport of soccer. These days, that metamorphosis is not limited to play on the field. In today’s graphical world, computers and the human imagination have added a new dimension to objects as prosaic as the plain-vanilla tournament draw sheet.

And if you’re looking for a novel and innovative soccer-themed gift for that special someone on Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa or Festivus, you might want to consider a radial World Cup poster.

HyperaktThe poster looks like a dart board.

The poster sprang from the brain of Deroy Peraza, a creative director at the Brooklyn design studio Hyperakt, who came to the United States at age 6 in 1984 and grew up in Miami playing soccer in the Latin American melting pot that is South Florida. He says he is “a huge soccer fan,” a supporter of Barcelona and the United States national team.

“As with every World Cup since we started the studio nine years ago, the month of the tournament is kind of unproductive,” he said. “We can’t concentrate on anything but the games. In the studio, we had an obsessive following. Then after one of the U.S. games this idea popped into my head. My partner sent me a text-based poster, it was kind of design-y, with a sweet minimalism to it, which I like.”

“I had seen the Marca graphic featured on a couple of blogs, but I think it was trying to do too much,” Peraza said. “Too much complication, too much information. You have to do a lot of work for the data visualization. The hardest problem to solve is to make it interesting and useful, so people don’t get too overwhelmed.”

For the poster, each country was assigned a color that they carried either to the championship (Spain) or until elimination (France). The 32-team event brought a symmetry to the design. Some teams were forced to crossover, or jump, around the poster, but following a color-coded team brings some interesting clarity to a tournament that is often more difficult to plumb in a two-dimensional representation.

“It was pretty time-consuming, about 20 hours to complete all using Illustrator on a Mac,” Peraza said. “I’d love to do more sports, maybe basketball and tennis, but especially soccer because it gives me a good excuse to be nerdy.”

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Goal, The New York Times soccer blog, will report on news and features from the world of soccer and around the Web. Times editors and reporters will follow international tournaments and provide analysis of games. There will be interviews with players, coaches and notable soccer fans, as well as a weekly blog column by Red Bulls forward Jozy Altidore. Readers can discuss Major League Soccer, foreign leagues and other issues with fellow soccer fans.